Translation and drafting aids in the European Union languages

The European Union has 23 official languages, and it has to publish its legislation in all of them. It also has to communicate with the authorities and the public in the Member States in their languages. The translators in the EU institutions who make this possible work behind the scenes, but theirs is a vital and complex task.

This page contains links to databases and guides to style and clear writing which you are free to use, as well as discussions of translation-related issues.

Details of the structure and organisation of the Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission, and information about employment opportunities, can be found on its homepage.

Freelance Aids

Freelance work

Links to other websites

Language aids

Online dictionaries, glossaries, clear writing campaigns, style guides, etc.

Bulgarian	Czech	Danish	Dutch
English	Estonian	Greek	Finnish
French	German	Hungarian	Irish
Italian	Latvian	Lithuanian	Maltese
Polish	Portuguese	Romanian	Slovak
Slovene	Spanish	Swedish

Multilingual resources

EU Legislation

EU Terminology

Drafting Guides

Language recognition

Ďakujeme vám za návštevu našej stránky. Is this Czech, Hungarian, Lithuanian or what?
Our field guide to the main languages of Europe will help you recognise which of the languages your text was written in.
Language identifiers

Special character sets

Do you want to type a word or name with special characters but don't know where to find the letters on your keyboard?
We have found a website with all kinds of character sets from which you can copy&paste the special characters into your document:

Languages of the EU-15-countries (except for Greek)
Languages of the new and future Member States (except for Bulgarian)
Bulgarian (and Russian)
Greek